Now every night can be Burns night

On the 250th anniversary of his birth, Robert Burns seems both remote and ever more urgently at hand. His essential unknowability disturbs Scots, the more so because he is so universally recognised. An international Burns cult somehow denies Scotland the enjoyment of a local boy made good, or gone attractively and forgivably wrong.

I've never been able to avoid him. I grew up in the shadow of one of his mistresses, an effigy of "Highland Mary" whose plaid perhaps conceals a pregnancy, gazing away towards Ayrshire. My father recited Tam O'Shanter entire, knew almost all the lyrics and some of the more salacious items in The Merry Muses of Caledonia. Visitors this New Year from London, Holland, New York and Moscow all sang Auld Lang Syne without a prompt and spoke fondly of "Rabbie Burns".

Robert Crawford is both a fellow poet and a St Andrews professor of modern Scottish literature. His approach to Burns reflects that and recognises that "Burns studies" have been fraught with self-serving controversy for the past 20 years. An earlier debunker of the Burns myth, Catherine Carswell, received a bullet in the post, with suggestions for its use. In 1994 the establishment pulled the trigger itself, professionally executing the biographer James Mackay on charges of plagiarism. This has obscured the extraordinary detail and scholarship that Mackay marshalled in his nearly 700 pages.

Crawford's account weighs in at half that, and is punchily definitive. The bare bones are familiar enough, but muddled with legend. Burns was born in Alloway, Ayrshire in January 1759 and died in Dumfries. He made his way as a farmer, more controversially as an exciseman, and as a literary celebrity, a favourite icon of the rising Romantic movement. Seeming contradictions pile up: the young radical and friend of smugglers ends up enforcing government revenues; the "heav'n-taught ploughman" doubles as a literary sophisticate; while he found the soils of Ayrshire as poor as his father had, the women who crossed his path proved teemingly fertile.

The brilliance of Crawford's argument lies in his recreation of the poet's intellectual and creative wakening as a young man. The life was just 37 years, but it isn't illuminated, as short lives often can be, by external contexts. The American "Revolution" and the French Revolution were important to what Burns became, but more so was the self-determined role he took as an educated Scot living in a society more economically, culturally and spiritually nuanced than previous accounts have allowed. We no longer understand the seamlessness of 18th-century learning, in which "natural philosophy" and an elegant epistolary style were simply points on a continuum, where there was no break between science and belief. Burns took in all this, and in Ayrshire's Tarbolton he found himself in a society that brought high and low into uncommonly close proximity.

Burns the radical was absolutely Burns the lover. Both were literary constructions. Armed with Masson's Collection of English Prose and Verse and with a book of fine letters (acquired under the impression that it was a guide to effective letter-writing), Burns turned himself into a modern bard, in whom the acts of singing, saying and writing were one with the arts of seduction and of social progress. There is, arguably, no more powerful demonstration of the power of literacy than Burns's life. His sexual conquests are merely signifiers of his power to entrap with words.

Crawford intuits that Burns is the original modern poet. Shakespeare was declared a bard politely and posthumously. Burns took on that mantle himself, boldly, sometimes aggressively, almost always wonderfully. Our avoidance of him as a serious object of study, precluded from the academy because of the Burns supper and the mnemonic popular appeal, now seems unnecessary. Crawford has delivered a living Burns: smart, arrogant, chivalrous, but also a strong poet to be confronted at every step of our written and sung culture. After this, we can't just take Burns down from the shelf this one night a year.